Orbit
by Scarlet Child
Summary: You’ve made your bed, now lie in it, knives or no knives. Harley/Joker.


_Orbit_

A/N: I've written heaps of Joker-centric fics (in my BRAIN), but technically this is the first piece of fan fiction I've written in awhile. Inspired by good Batman Begins/Dark Knight fan fiction and written to every single song by _Sea Wolf _and during the time I should have spent writing up staff rosters.

Rating: T, for now. Will probably change though so be warned, kiddies.

Disclaimer: Don't own anything!

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To say Harley enjoyed the prospect of twenty-hour-long days and nothing to do with them was like saying she preferred to sleep on a bed of rusty nails. Which, in retrospect, was quite an appropriate comparison considering just how often the latter event occurred. Not much of a surprise considering the man who shared her bed (and rarely, as he tended to value sleep as much as dead bodies) was a walking swiss army knife. At this point, she knew the feel of his knives better than him, sad to say.

The first night at their new hideout - abandoned warehouse by the water - she lay in bed nursing a dislocated wrist and sore throat from a near miss with the Gotham PD, making hurting sounds as a plea for attention, while the Joker spent the best part of three hours smashing all the windows on the western wall to keep a watchful eye on Gotham. When she had finally resigned herself to the fact that he clearly did not need sleep to function, she rolled over onto his side of the bed - onto what she suspected was a rusted corkscrew.

She had removed it in confusion, and disposed of it into the river. When he rampaged around the house the next week, yelling for his missing cork screw ("Corkscrew, where are you!"), she told him she had disposed of it, presented him with a new one, and happily chimed: "have fun screwin' those corks." The confused look on his face was enough to convince her that he had absolutely no idea what the true function of a corkscrew was, and his google search history later confirmed it.

The second night, it was nails hidden in her pillow. Upon questioning, the Joker had just shrugged and mumbled about the convenience of hiding places and then told her he loved her twice in a row (he had just downed 80ml of cough syrup and was surprisingly placid under the influence of medication. As well as the additional benefit of him tasting like cherry instead of gum disease.)

The third night, she didn't even flinch when her elbow connected with the steel lid of a cat food tin. Far from the usual discomfort of weapon upon flesh, she found herself wondering, what, exactly, was the point of it, considering they didn't have a cat.

_Maybe that was why he left them there_ - to make her wonder. Maybe it was even a clue, the fragments of a puzzle to piece together, a general hinting towards… _nah._ She dismissed this thought almost as soon as she considered it. It wasn't like Mister J to play hide and seek with his precious devices of torture and mass murder. She guessed it was either down to a magpie-like tendency (anything shiny makes the nest) or just a compulsion for mess. She hoped it was the former. After all, he kept her in that bed too. Even if it was just wishful thinking, she liked the idea of being collected, of being of value, even if it was only for four hours a night.

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She awoke that morning with a bitter taste in her mouth. Like someone had jammed a pack of batteries in her mouth while she was sleeping.

She lay for a minute, eyes still shut, reaching out with one hand, intending to rest it upon the Joker's side. He always slept hunched on his side, when he did sleep at all.

He wasn't there this morning, though. Her fingers came up with sheets and she recoiled, disappointed. She knew better than to expect his presence there for most of the time, but it didn't make it any easier. She rolled onto her left side and squinted past the sunlight invading through her broken bedroom window. The clock read 3:00pm.

_Of course it reads 3:00pm, _Harley thought with a groan, pulling the covers off her sticky body, _It always reads 3:00pm. _

She considered getting up, but the idea of dressing and dragging herself downstairs, to breathe in second hand smoke from Joker's henchmen, while they loaded guns and played with "equipment" she wasn't allowed to touch, didn't particularly thrill her. The downside to living with the Joker was living with his lackeys; it was like moving into your boyfriend's house only to find that he's already living with five of his trigger happy, stripper-enthusiastic best mates.

She was deeply annoyed by this arrangement and went out of her way to express her disappointment. It took two weeks for the Joker to notice and when he did, he suggested to her – kindly, he must have imagined himself – that if she needed breathing room, she could go to the river.

She had pointed out that the river didn't count as breathing space because of the lack of sustainable human habitat and anyway, she didn't _like_ fish, and he had backhanded her in response. Clearly, he felt she wasn't appreciating his generosity. She had kept her mouth shut after that, but had sectioned off the billiard room (aka the conference room) as the "breathing room."

_It was pointless though_… and she groaned again, this time into her pillow. The Joker never noticed (his conferences were usually sporadic and impromptu) and the rest of the men just moved their rendezvous point into the flimsy five-metre-wide kitchen, leaving Harley to seethe in bed for hours at a time, similar to her current predicament.

Harley jerked her body round to face the Joker's side of bed again, her hand brushing against a hard object. She sighed, reached beneath the tangled sheets and propped up a brick of a book entitled: _Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care._

_Now that's strange, _she thought and then frowned… _Or is it?  
_

God, she didn't even trust her own thoughts anymore; they spoke in a different voice than the one that spoke aloud.

Sighing, she flipped the book open and blinked. A square of around three inches by three inches had been carved out of the book, leaving an opening, connecting words to other words, making no sense whatsoever.

_Though that's probably the point_, she thought bitterly, _Mister J always carving things out of anything he can, never makin' ends meet. For someone so erratic, he sure is predictable. _

She brushed the tips of her fingers into the hollowed base, wondering what had been in there. Or what he planned to put in there. _Maybe he hasn't found anything important enough to keep safe yet. _

Harley set the book down and lay back with a dramatic sigh, wistfully wishing, for the first time in her life, that she was three inches tall.

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"What is the use of a cork screw?" is under my google search history. I'm still trying to figure out who asked it.

This is going somewhere, I swear. Maybe only for a few chapters if I feel like it. Tell me what you think! x


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